


Shalott

by kerlin



Category: Alias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-11 09:09:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am half-sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shalott

Some days, Julia forgot she had ever been a brunette.

In the larger picture, of course, hair color was only one of the things she had left behind when Sydney Bristow had died in a Russian basement, impaled on a dagger and bleeding out her life's blood on Julia's hands. Morals had been discarded as well, to be replaced by expediency; a fair enough trade, all things considered.

Memories were a tricky thing. Someone long ago in Julia's life had been a psychology major, and had explained to her that most of what resided in the human subconscious was the mental equivalent of fill-in-the-blank. Most of what a person categorized as memory was actually wishful thinking.

Most of what resided in her subconscious had been carefully woven in with new facts, new faces, and new details to paper over the smaller cracks and the outright canyons.

Sydney Bristow's life had been filled with small gestures to make up a whole, and Julia Thorne's life was concerned with grand gestures lacking any depth. So the sheets were thousand count Egyptian cotton, but they were stiff and wine-colored and smelled like no one's skin but her own. The clothes were Gucci, Armani, and the next big thing of the week, but they had been waiting for her in the closet, with no one but the mirror to tell her what they looked like against her skin.

It was the slow, systematic replacements that were more difficult in the end. Julia could twist a knife just-so to ensure permanent damage and she could shoot out a jugular at a hundred yards: these things had been simple to learn, and to follow through on.

But Julia also took her coffee with one sugar and no cream, and turned the water to cold for the last two minutes of her shower. She slept with all the lights completely off and a window cracked to let in the far-off noise of Rome. Sydney had preferred two sugars and one cream, and had always taken longer-than-necessary, hotter-than-necessary showers. She slept with a childhood nightlight in the hall; she had, in fact, been afraid of the dark as a child, an irony that was not lost on Julia.

Julia pressed her palms flat against Simon's shoulders, shoving him down on the bed, and attacked with teeth and fingernails. She refused to remember that Sydney's lips would have been searching out the hollow at the base of his neck while her fingers curled around tattooed biceps. Memory was repetition: the more times the tattoo wasn't there when she looked for it, the more times the smells were of gunpowder and expensive perfume, the more times the taste was of caviar and red wine, and the more she would look for those things and not sun and ice cream, sea salt and strawberries.

Sydney would have called it compartmentalizing. Julia called it surviving.


End file.
